Once Upon a Time...

For the last decade at least, I have been moving towards one goal in life - to become an academic. It was something I decided on when I realised how much I loved university, and how much I loved studying and learning. Almost every action in my life has basically been about how this will help me get to this goal in my life. A lot of the frustration and unhappiness in my life has been when this goal has become unclear to me - when the obstacles have seemed too great, or when something has required me to change my plans.

But I've been wondering recently. The person who made that choice, the me that made that goal, that was a long time ago - almost 8 years ago, in fact. As one might expect, 8 years will do a lot to a person. Hell, just the past 4 years have changed me, to someone I'm not sure the me from 8 years ago would recognise. And I've been looking at that goal, wondering: Is that the goal that I really want now? I do want to learn, I do want to study. These are things that I still want to do, and still drive my passions. But am I cut out for academia? Academia is a lot more than studying and learning - it's an entire culture and way of life, and can be a very cut-throat world, full of competition for time and funding.

When I was in uni, as a student, it was all very simple - I loved uni, I loved the people there, and I had no real plans to leave and do anything else. I'd found my home, and it was a great home. Now that I've been gone a while though, I've been occasionally looking back, looking at that culture from where I am now, and I can't say that it inspires me terribly now. I'm just not sure that what I want to do is worth everything that I'm going to have to put up with to do it.

The question afterwards, of course, becomes what do I do now, and I'm not really sure on that one just yet. I've focused on the one goal for so long that I never even looked at everything else that I could be doing. I'm fairly certain I don't want to be a real perpetual uni student (I'm not even sure that's sustainable these days), and I know that I'm not terribly interested in being a Call Centre monkey forever either. Some things are pretty constant regardless of what I decide to aim for (for example, paying off debt is going to be prereq for most things that require a big change in income), so it doesn't change the current course of my life too much. But past the short term, I'm just not sure what's next for me, and I can't help but worry about that somewhat, even though worrying doesn't seem to be coming up with any answers. I'm not sure I want to drift from goal to goal, never having a real clue of where I'm going to end up.

It's just a big question mark in my life, and it's only confronting because I'd never realised how big that was, and how fragile what was covering it was, before I started questioning it. And to answer it, I have to do that thing that I'm not so great at doing, which is actually knowing myself enough to have a goal I want to work towards.

It's at times like these I really wish I had a better handle on myself. Then again, maybe I have a better handle on myself than I thought if I'm in this quandry...

This was originally posted at http://kirby1024.dreamwidth.org/124944.html

While depositing money at the bank today, I discovered that someone had, at some point in the recent past, given me a 20c coin from Fiji, instead of an Australian one.

(20 cents from Fiji is exactly the same size, colour, and basic look as an Australian 20 cents. But it's not legal tender, so banks won't accept it.)


My first thought:
"Ack! Some bastard has given me the incorrect coin so that he could get rid of it! How horribly unfair! Stupid horrible person!"

My second thought:
"Hmm. Next time I have to give someone loose change, I'll have to surreptitiously hand them this one, so it can be their problem instead of mine..."


The irony didn't really strike me until a few minutes ago.

Happy Birthday to nwhepcat and swellen!

I hope you both have a great day!

I won some banners!

At the Wicked Awards, for Final Instructions:




At still_grrr, for Red Night Rising:




And also, for writing stuff every week:




Yay!

Congrats to the other Wicked Award winners, especially clawofcat, snowpuppies, and the_royal_anna!

Happy Birthday, beer_good_foamy!

*bakes a cake, and decorates with funky candles*

Have a wonderful day!

I have lived in Australia for 27 years now, and today, for the first time, I got heat-stroke. (Or possibly heat-exhaustion. We're not quite sure.)


This all happened because I was outside walking around without water for a grand total of three hours. It wasn't even all that hot - only 32 degrees (90F) - but my body just decided to shut down.

So I almost fainted, then drank lots of water, then vomited all the water back up onto the floor of the train, got escorted home by a very concerned colleague, and spent several hours lying on my mum's couch hoping I'd feel better soon.

THIS WEEK'S PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: DRINK WATER, FOLKS. THERE'S NOTHING 'UN-COOL' ABOUT HEALTHY HYDRATION LEVELS.



(For the record - yes, I am feeling much better. Thanks for asking.)

Well that is the way to celebrate a birthday.

Margaret got in late on Friday and after we met up we went back to the hotel and had a glass of Champagne. Very nice.

After a pleasant morning drinking coffee and reading it was off to the River Cafe for a totally wonderful lunch.

To start I had pasta with a sauce made from rabbit, pheasant and grouse. Very very delicious. Margaret had Langoustine which where also excellent. However the stand out dish was the beef secondi. It was two peices of beef fillet that had been wrapped in procuito and then cooked very very slowly in wine. It was so so tender so so tasty. Margaret didn't finish hers so we took Gordon Ramsey's advice and asked for it to be wrapped up so we could take it away. It made a very tasty breakfast on Sunday morning. We also had a rather excellent wine which broke all my usual wine rules. It was called "L'insiemme" and was a 2005 Nebbiolo/Barbera/Cab. Sav/Pinot Noir) from Ca Viola of Piemonte, Italy. It broke the no more than two grape variety rule that I have but we had it on advice of the Somelier and it lived up to her promises. I have drunk wines that opened up or changed as you drank them but I have never had one that changed quite so often. Sometimes it was the fruit of the cab sav, sometimes the light earlyness of the Pinot at other times something else entirely. The Somelier it was quirky and very much a bit of fun.

After a lesuirely walk and a bit of shopping we moved on to the Devonshire Arms for drinks with friends. We had quite a good turn out and I can say this is a very nice pub. They had Hobgoblin and DoomBar on tap and by all acounts some good mulled cider and a few good wines. We had a good turn out with 8 people other than myself and Margaret oh and a dog. (Hi Freki) From there a few of us returned to our hotel for more drinks. I had an excellent single malt.

A slight draw back to the weekend was the hotel. The Park City in Kensington is nice enough hotel and so it should be but something was wrong with their heating and it was stuck on meaning that it was bakingly hot in the room at night. Not terribly pleasant. When we asked about getting it fixed we where promised maintanence on Saturday morning but on Saturday morning we where told there was no maintance on the weekends. Pretty poor realy.

Sunday morning after a long lie in (interupted by a call my from Brother and his daughter at 8:30am) we went in search of breakfast. We found a rather splendidly chaotic place where I had a most excellent bacon sarnie and Margaret had pancakes.

So yes a rather good way to spend your birthday.

...and here they all are.

( many pretty pictures )

Meme stolen from brutti_ma_buoni:
Post a paragraph from all the WIPs you can find, no further comments.

I don't have any "WIPs" in the "already posted half of it" sense, but I do have quite a few unfinished fics floating around on my hard drive. So here goes...

( some snippets )

I realised something unexpected this morning.

It was because stormwreath posted a list of all his fanfic, arranged by season. And I decided to look at mine, and see what seasons had the most stories, and so forth. (For the record: season 6 has the most. I seem to like it a lot.)

But the thing is, stormwreath had said this:
“The challenging part, of course, is that some of these fics are mutually contradictory. I’ve written Buffy’s final death scene three times, twice in glorious battle and once of old age, peacefully in bed: they can’t all be right! So I decided which one would be my own fanon, and marked the others ‘AU’.”

…and I thought, “Oh, well that probably won’t happen much with mine. Maybe once, but all the rest of my post-series stuff seems to be pretty consistent.”

*facepalm*

( I am surprisingly bad at predicting stuff )

Happy birthday, ms_scarletibis!

Have a fantastic day!

Recently, they've been filming a new version of "Clash of the Titans".
Gone is the virtuosic stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen, replaced by CGI (he's unhappy there's no stop-mo in the remake of "his" film) that appears to be in the style of "300". I'm puzzled by Hollywood's fascination with remaking classic films / TV shows, usually making a hash of it in the process.
Looking on the bright side, they're rumoured to have kept the story mostly the same.
And the cast ain't half bad. The film stars Liam Neesona Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades, Gemma Arterton as Io, and Sam Worthington as the heroic Perseus.
Directed by Louis Leterrier, who did the latest "Incredible Hulk" film and "Transporter 2".

( Movie promo posters and a still from the film )

Here's a vid, for lavastar's birthday. Have a great day, hon!

( Willow/Xander vidness )

Four day weekend!


Today was Melbourne Cup Day - known hereabouts as "The Race That Stops A Nation".

And it really, really does.


I got in my car at 3:04 this afternoon, and the radio was playing talking instead of music, so I changed the channel. And... then checked that, yes, I really had changed the channel.

All six channels in my car were playing EXACTLY the same thing. Because the RACE was on.


Why on earth a horse race should be so exciting that the entire country stops doing everything just to watch/listen, I'm not quite sure. But apparently it's awesome.

I, on the other hand, spent Cup Day resolutely ignoring the horse races, and having fun relaxing and being non-sporty and Proud Of It. Just like I always do on Cup Day.

Well I finally did it. I rebuilt my laptop.

Its all gone very well so far.

Just need to reinstall most of the applications but I am waiting for the Windows Update to finish up first.

I don't often re-post stuff from GetUp here because I assume most of my friends are intelligent/educated enough to be aware of the issues (or are already subscribed to GetUp)...but this recent mess over boat-people makes it necessary to try that bit harder to get the message out far and wide.

As I see it, K-Rudd is doing a J.Ho -- having a go at refugees for political gain.
It's disgusting to take such a cheap shot when people's lives are at stake and in light of our international human rights obligations.

It might be a bit much for a show of compassion from the (not-so-)Liberal Party, and I'm sick of the way the ALP are borrowing their worst policies...but let's at least attempt to have some truth in the debate over asylum-seekers and boat-people.

GetUp's page on the issue: http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/EndMandatoryDetention&id=818

The GetUp fact-sheet is quite informative and well researched. Debunk the myths: https://www.getup.org.au/files/campaigns/asylum_myths_factsheet.pdf

So, back in April, I took some time to tell the world about Tempus from Lois&Clark, and how wonderful he is.

And now I'm back, to tell you all about another brilliant TV villain: Harvey, from Farscape.

( spoilery, screencap-heavy post inside )